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Maybe so. I'll have to find out from our web team. Thanks!

Hi there,

When you add pages to a site, do you need to re-generate an XML site map and re-submit to Google/Bing? I see the option in Google Webmaster Tools under the "fetch as Google tool" to submit individual pages for indexing, which I am doing right now.

Thanks,
Sarah

Thank you so much. I'm a content gal, so I'm still learning all this coding stuff as fast as I can. Really appreciate the help.

Yes! Thank you! Going to fetch as Google and see if that sheds any light.

Hi all,

I have a few pages that - despite having a robots meta tag and no follow, no index, they are showing up in Google SERPs. In troubleshooting this with my team, it was brought up that another page could be linking to these pages and causing this. Is that plausible? How could I confirm that?

Thanks,
Sarah

Thanks Chris. I plan to move forward. God I hope I don't ever have to do this again.

Yes it does - thank you!

This is probably going to sound like the silliest question ever, but I have to ask. Does an article that requires a subscription to read count as a backlink? Is there any difference in that type of backlink as opposed to one that doesn't require a subscription?

Thanks.

Breakout from an earlier question today ...

G+ versus Google My Business:

Looks like I lost descriptions and cover pictures on my Google Places locations during the dashboard switchover. I have 70 locations - is it worth cleaning up at this time? I would hate to invest all of that, only to learn later I  need to migrate to Google My Business (and potentially - likely? - face similar issues).

Thanks,
Sarah

Thanks Keri - right on!

Update: I received a thorough response from Moz support educating me on the reporting. I was able to cross-reference the duplicate errors with the the rel canonical notifications to eliminate the ones that are okay.

Help Team Ninja Chiaryn Miranda brought to attention a problem that we did have, and I was able to cull through the errors and nail down which ones needed to be fixed.

Couple of excerpts of her help (with her permission). I am especially excited about the dismiss error tool that will be coming out someday. Thank you Chiaryn!

"We prefer to provide data that takes the tack of "rather be safe then sorry" and report on the issues to the highest degree of error that we have seen Google penalize a site for so it is sometimes true that they are not as strict as our tools. It isn't a bug in our system that shows these errors; it is just that we have decided to show errors that Google may consider at their strictest level of penalization."

_____________

"Our software is definitely meant as a guide of things to look at on your site and not an absolute set of rules that are required for success in SEO. Even our in-house SEO doesn't expect to ever get our own list of errors and warnings down to zero, she uses our crawl diagnostics more as a meter for any huge changes to the errors that might indicate a problem on the site. There are always things that aren't able to be corrected on a site, but we still report on them because it is a snapshot of your site architecture and we think it is important to share that. Duplicate content is an especially difficult issue because Google isn't consistent about how they penalize for it. Also, while the search engines don't index pages that have a canonical tag pointing to a different URL, we include them in the errors when they show as duplicates of any other URL that isn't in the canonical tag because that indicates an issue between the canonical URL and the other duplicate. We do still note which pages have canonical tags on them in the notices section of the report.

In the future, with our Moz Analytics platform, we will actually be adding the ability to dismiss error notifications that you fell aren't significant to the specific SEO plan you are implementing on your site, but that may still be a few months out."

According to this, it really isn't known for sure yet:

http://searchengineland.com/now-official-google-adds-restaurant-menus-search-results-185708

Agreed. Besides, maybe someone (a newbie like me!) with the same question could see how I figured it out, then try it on their own. Or someone can see what I did and say "wait, that's not right ... ".

I think it comes from my mentality of not to wanting waste people's time on questions I found the answer to - but, yes, we wouldn't want to punish the people putting time into answering, especially when it can help someone else. Thanks for bringing that up, Keri!

With the help of a 3rd party contractor, our company has been claiming and curating local listings for several months across dozens of advised platforms. After months of nightmares with Yahoo support, I see that they no longer support free basic local listings and you must buy enhanced listings at $9.95.

I'm correct in proposing this to my supervisors, right? We have 70 locations so that's a pretty penny (and have already dropped some funds on our initial efforts), but isn't this a necessity? Not just because it's a top 3 search engine, that it's a major part of the local ecosystem, but that they also have partnered with Yelp and are ramping up their local search efforts?

I know there are new tools out there right now (Moz Local, Yext, Locu, etc.), but I only need Yahoo and they don't fit in with our needs at this time.

Please advise - thank you!

Thanks! I'll start the conversation with our content team then. I think the ends justify the means.

Yep, I looked in Yext. The package we would need to get just wasn't at the right price point.

Yep, we've done all of that.

Just making sure I've done my due diligence. And I was just advised by a trusted source that purchasing those Yahoo listings is, essentially, ill-advised.

This is why I love Moz.

You are not alone. I don't understand as well and would love to hear an answer on this!

Hi Paul! Is there any way to know whether the GWT parameter directive is working? Since only Google has that information, do they have a way to cross-check that the directive was correctly given and executed?

As an aside, I will be really pushing for canonical tags when I meet with our MIS department, but I have been warned that I may not be successful. Why would that be? I must add that we have an old, rickety site authored in SharePoint 2010. My job is to do the best I can and cross my fingers we upgrade to SP 2013.

Thanks,
Sarah

So glad to come across this thread today - thank you for your help!